Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Joel is having doubts about his breaking up with Naomi in favor of Clementine.

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I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake. I almost reached for the phone about a thousand times. I thought I could take it back, erase it, explain I had momentarily lost my mind. Then I told myself we weren’t happy. That was the truth. That what we were was safe. It was unfair to you and to me to stay in a relationship for that reason. I thought about Clementine and the spark when I was with her, but then I thought what you and I had was real and adult and therefore significant even if it wasn’t much fun. But I wanted fun. I saw other people having fun and I wanted it. Then I thought fun is a lie, that no one is really having fun; I’m being suckered by advertising and movie bullshit … then I thought maybe not, maybe not. And then I thought, as I always do at this point in my argument, about dying.

-- “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, screenplay by Charlie Kaufman

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The Joy of Reading

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

I have coming across a number of articles that seem to bespeak a freshening of literary studies and of the joy in reading good books. These quotations come from one of them.

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Montaigne himself wrote a wonderful essay suggesting that the three best things in life are friendship, sex and reading, and the best of the three is reading. Your friend may die, your sexual partner may betray you, but literature is always there. He did, however, concede, “Reading has its disadvantages – they are weighty ones: it exercises the soul, but during that time the body remains inactive and grows earth-bound and sad.”

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For Wood ... literature is therapy for the vacancy left by the loss of the religious faith that sustained his parents...


-- Jonathan Bate at New Statesmen

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